"Markets move quickly!" – you’ve heard me say it or write it countless times.
 
The S&P 500 (which represents over 500 of the biggest companies in the U.S.) had its worst December since 1931. What happened next? The S&P 500 had its best January since 1987. In December, did we panic and sell? No. In January, did we get over-confident and make irrational decisions? Didn’t do that either. Instead, we stayed calm. And we stayed calm because we know this is what markets do; they’ve done this before too many times to count, so when it happened in December / January, we were prepared and we knew how to handle it, and when it happens again, we’ll be prepared for that too.
 
Kudos to our clients because not one panicked in December; there were emails and phone calls, which are welcomed, but nobody sold while the markets were down. If it was warranted, we took opportunities to shift money into stocks for clients and (on paper at least) they’ve received a little extra boost in their portfolio’s value with January’s rebound, more so than if we had done nothing in December, or even worse, had we sold in December.
 
Again, stay calm and stay the course, but the more of these quick volatile moves we get through, the better prepared and less worried we’ll be when they happen again.  

Please click here for the Q4, 2018 Market Summary provided by DFA. Q4 was very bad for U.S. and foreign stock markets, as well as global real estate exposure. Please take a look at page 4 (also pasted below) for a long-term market summary. Here you’ll see all big red down arrows for our 1-Year market performance, but, more importantly, don’t overlook the big green up arrows that represent 5 and 10-Year market performance. When investing in stock markets we know a lot of short time frames, like a month, a quarter, or maybe even a year or two will be down red arrows, but that’s OK because we invest in stocks for long time frames, like 10 years, 20 years or even more. And long time frames will show us plenty of big green arrows pointing up.

With the ugly performance of the US stock market since the beginning of October it’s important to remember why we must diversify our retirement portfolios. There’s a world of opportunities in stocks, but only about half of those opportunities are in US companies, so the other half is outside of here in the foreign and emerging markets. 
 
When we diversify (by investing in thousands of big and small companies in the US and abroad) we accomplish two things:

1. We decrease the likelihood that we’ll have the best or worst performing portfolio. And when it comes to our one shot at planning our retirement, we can’t swing for the fences and come away with either a home run or a strike out.
2. We reduce and help manage catastrophic losses that can come with investing in one area of the market or investing in just a handful of companies.

 
For more information, you can check out this article from DFA; I highlighted a couple areas I thought were important to read.

So far, the month of October has given back all the gains of the S&P 500 3 months prior. In other words, the price of the S&P 500 Index on July 10th is pretty close to its price today. It’s important to keep in mind that stock markets go up and down quickly; very seldom do we see slow and steady growth or slow and steady declines. What do we do about these quick movements? Stay the course. This might be a bump in the road towards higher stock prices or this might be the beginning of a long road down for stock prices – we just don’t know which one will happen next. We’re not going to know when to get out before sharp declines happen or when to get in before quick rallies happen, so we need to stay invested every day. When we stay invested every day we’ll take part in all of the markets’ upswings and downswings, but we take comfort in knowing we’ll participate in more and larger upswings than downswings, and over time, this will build wealth for us. This is what markets do – sharp movements, and the ones to the downside feel like they hurt more, but keep calm, stay the course and you’ll be well rewarded in the end. 

image courtesy of yahoo.com

Here you can view the quarterly report for Q3, 2018, it concludes with a write up called The Total Price of Ownership. Owning shares of a mutual fund come with a cost. Some mutual fund companies charge you a “load” or a commission to purchase or sell their mutual fund, while all mutual funds have operating costs and manager compensation baked into the price of the fund. This baked in cost is known as the expense ratio; an expense ratio of .50% means a cost of $500 (paid by you, the investor) is baked into an investment of $100,000, for example. 
 
Loads are unnecessary and can be easily avoided so we choose to only use mutual funds that are “no-load” funds. Expense ratios can’t be avoided, so we make sure to use mutual funds with smaller expense ratios, because the less you pay to invest the more you make. Keep in mind, as the article points out, expense ratios aren’t the end all be all when making fund selections and they don’t always tell the whole story when it comes to the cost of owning a fund. You can give the article a read for a more detailed dive into the total price of fund ownership.